Can You Splint a Heart?
by chocolatebearturk
Summary: Abed helps Annie when she injures her hand punching Jeff in the face.


_Can You Splint a Heart?_

"I'm on the clock for another hour if you want me to do some Batman lines."

Troy glared at the Clooney impersonator and the man quickly shut his mouth. The team Abed had hired gathered their things as the study group took in what had just happened.

There was a long, long silence among them. Shirley pinched the bridge of her nose and looked as though she was fighting the urge to cry. Troy and Pierce refused to look at one another and Britta stood on her own by her seat, looking oddly abandoned. Jeff had his back to them all and finally Annie could not rein in her anger any longer.

"You really suck, you know that?" She glared at Jeff as he turned to look at her. "I mean it. I can't believe I ever thought you were different from any other guy on this planet. I gave you the summer to cool down, you know? I thought that things might be different this year. But you're the same smarmy Jeff and I'm the same gullible Annie." She moved toward the door. "Oh, and by the way? Nice job offending _Abed_, the only person in the world you _hadn't_ managed to psychologically scar."

Without giving him a chance to defend himself, she stalked out of the room and turned the way Abed had gone, determined to put distance between herself and Jeff.

A throb from her hand reminded her of the pain she'd been trying to push down since she had punched Jeff in the face. She found herself on a familiar route to one of the cleaner bathrooms of the school and didn't attempt to change her course, distracted by the pain. She stopped in the hall and experimentally flexed her hand and whimpered when pain shot through her fingers. The knuckle of her index finger was starting to swell and bending the finger itself hurt like hell.

She bit her lip and forced herself not to look at it or touch it. She looked up and gasped when she saw that Abed had managed to sneak up next to her. "Abed! What have I said about doing that?"

"It freaks you out and… I can't really remember the rest because you only said it once and that was near the beginning of last year," he said. Then he smiled, "Just kidding, you said that I needed to be more careful or someday I'd get attacked."

"It didn't sink in, did it?" she asked, smiling a little at his purely Abed joke. She gasped when her nervous gesture of drawing her hands together bumped her finger and she broke eye contact to look down at it again. The swelling was getting worse—both her index and middle fingers were larger than their normal size and her first finger was stiff. She didn't want to try bending it again.

"What happened here?" Abed said, reaching for her hand. Before she could even think to protest, he had her hand in his as he examined the damage that had been done. "It looks like you might've broken your finger."

"_Broken_?" Annie said. Her voice sounded shrill to her own ears. "You're kidding, right?"

"You're the one who punched Jeff in the face, then? I mean, today. Not in December when we had that huge fight with the weird bullies," Abed said, seemingly ignoring her outburst. Annie nodded and his mouth quirked momentarily, as if in a smile. It didn't stay long enough for her to tell. "You've got a lot of power behind your punches, if you made him bleed like that… and broke your finger."

"No, I just don't know how to throw a punch," she mumbled. She stared down at their hands, loosely entangled as Abed continued to inspect her fingers for signs of damage. _His_ fingers, she noticed, were very long and warm where they touched hers, gently turning her hand this way and that. She cleared her throat. "Um, where did you learn to treat broken fingers?"

"The falafel business is more violent than people think," Abed told her. Even his voice was quieter and gentler than normal. He met her eyes. "I learned first aid in case any of the customers started to feel a little…" He paused and then shrugged. "There's a perfect word for that joke, but I can't think of it."

Annie laughed. "So, what's the diagnosis, doctor?"

"It looks like you broke your index finger and bruised the knuckle of your middle finger. I know how to splint it, but I think I should probably drive you to the hospital—" he began, but Annie cut him off.

"Do you think you could? Splint it, I mean," she said quickly. Normally, she would have agreed that the hospital was the better option, but right now… right now she wanted him to keep talking to her in that low, comforting voice. Right now, she wanted him to keep touching her hand with his warm, gentle fingers. Right now, she wanted his quiet presence. She was hurting and he was helping and it just felt _so good_ to have someone look her in the eyes and not be judging her.

Abed glanced up at her before he said, "Well, I was going to splint it anyway. It's not good to leave your finger like that for very long. The hospital will be able to handle this better than I can, though—"

"I-I don't want to bother the doctors up there with something like a broken finger," she invented, scrambling to keep this moment from ending. She knew it was kind of desperate and knew that Abed would see through her awful attempt at lying, so she finally just met his gaze and said, "Please? For a good friend?"

She saw a spark of recognition in Abed's eye. He pulled back slightly and smirked for the barest second before he said, "I didn't know we were good friends. I thought we were more like Phoebe and Chandler. They never had stories together."

"You know, I'm starting to wonder if that analogy really fits us anymore," Annie said, smiling softly. "We walk into school together, we were trading texts all summer and I went to the midnight showing of _Star Wars_ at the Riverside Cinema when Troy couldn't make it."

Abed was silent after that, but Annie assumed it was because he was trying to think of a new analogy for their relationship. He managed to find them a first aid kit behind the checkout desk and had begun splinting her finger when he finally spoke again. "Under ordinary circumstances, I would probably call us Lizzie and Gordo," Abed said as he wound the tape around her fingers. "With me as Lizzie."

"Why you as Lizzie?"

He paused to look up at her and she got the distinct impression she was supposed to know this already. "Troy is Miranda."

"Ah," she said. She swallowed. Didn't Gordo have a crush on Lizzie? "What makes circumstances _un_ordinary?"

Abed ripped the adhesive tape and finished with her fingers, refusing to look her in the eyes for a moment. "I asked Troy to text you and say he couldn't make the _Star Wars_ showing," he said.

(end)


End file.
